Is it not an instance - rare but by no means unheard of - of a chicken's getting even?

Here is a page from the Upton Letters:


The O.E.D. has an interesting discussion of the relative merits of "slumberous" and "slumbrous." "Slumbrous" was the older form (cf. "wondrous") but the "e" was introduced by the above-mentioned Dr. Johnson in 1755.

Well done, Bryn.

Ok, this is LONG, but it's all in the acumulation, one of Roth's ecstatic, hyperventilating endings. It's the (not quite) ending of American Pastoral (Philip Roth). This is the ending imagined by the main character. A page and a half later, it's deflated to a mundane and utterly devastating non-event.


The thought of her walking the length of that underpass one more time had terrified him all through dinner - in her rags and sandals walking alone through that filth and darkness among the underpass derelicts
 who undrestood that she loved them.  However, while he had been at the table formulating no solution, she had been nowhere near the underpass but - he all at once envisioned it - already back in the countryside, here in the lovely Morris County countryside that had been tamed over the centuries by ten American generations, back walking the hilly roads that were edged now, in September, with the red and burnt orange of devil's paintbrush, with a matted profusion of asters and goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace, an entangled bumper crop of white and blue and pink and wine-colored flowers artistically topping their workaday stems, all the flowers she had learned to identify and classify as a 4-H Club project and then on their walks together had taught him, a city boy, to recognize - 'See, Dad, how there's a n-notch at the tip of the petal?' - chicory, cinquefoil, pasture thistle, wild pinks, joe-pye weed, the last vestiges of yellow-flowered wild mustard sturdily spilling over from the fields, clover, yarrow, wild sunflowers, stringy alfalfa escaped from an adjacent farm and sporting its simple lavendar blossom, the bladder campion with its clusters of white-petalled flowers and the distended little sac back of the petals that she loved to pop loudly in the palm of her hand, the erect mullein whose toungulike velvety leaves she plucked and wore inside her sneakers - so as to be like the first settlers, who, according to her history teacher, used mullein leaves for insoles - the milkweed whose exquisitely made pods she would carefully tear open as a kid so she could blow into the air the silky seed-bearing down, thus feeling herself at one with nature, imagining that she was the everlasting wind. Indian Brook flowing rapidly on her left, crossed by little bridges, dammed up for swimming holes along the way and opening into the strong trout stream where she'd fished with her father - Indian Brook crossing under the road, flowing eastward from the mountain where it arises. On her left the pussy willows, the swamp maples, the marsh plants; on her right the walnut trees nearing fruition, only weeks from dropping the nuts whose husks when she pulled them apart would darkly stain her fingers and pleasantly stink them up with an acid pungency. On her right the black cherry, the field plants, the mowed fields. Up on the hills the dogweed trees; beyond them the woodlands - the maples, the oaks, and the locusts, abundant and tall and straight. She used to collect their beanpods in the fall. She used to collect everything, catalog everything, explain to him everything, examine with the pocket magnifying glass he'd given her every chameleonlike crab spider that she brought home to hold briefly captive in a moistened mason jar, feeding it on dead houseflies until she released it back onto the goldenrod or the Queen Anne's lace ('Watch what happens now, Dad') where it resumed adjusting its color to ambush its prey. Walking northwest into a horizon still thinly alive with light, walking up through the twilight call of the thrushes; up past the white pasture fence she hated, up past the hayfields, the corn fields, the turnip fields she hated, up past the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams, the springs, the falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes ('The pioneers used them, Mom, to scrub their pots and pans'), the meadows, the acres and acres of wood she hated, up from the village, tracing her father's high-spirited, happy Johnny Appleseed walk until, just as the first few stars appeared, she reached the century-old maple trees that she hated and the substantial old stone house, imprinted with her being, that she hated, the house in which there lived the substantial family, also imprinted with her being, that she also hated.

At an hour, in a season, through a landscape that for so long now has been bound up with the idea of solace, of beauty and sweetness and pleasure and peace, the ex-terroist had come, quite on her own, back from Newark to all that she hated and did not want, to a coherent, harmonious world that she despised and that she, with her embattled youthful mischief, the strangest and most unlikely attacker, had turned upside down. Come back from Newark and immediately, immediately confessed to her father's father what her great idealism had caused her to do.

'Four poeple, Grandpa', she'd told him, and his heart could not bear it. Divorce was bad enough in a family, but murder, and the murder not merely of one but of one plus three? The murder of four?

'No!' exclaimed Grandpa to this veiled intruder reeking of feces who claimed to be their beloved Merry, 'No!' and his heart gave up, gave out, and he died.

I first read Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey when I was about the age of the heroine.  Among other things, it is a parody of Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho so deadly that I know just what Udolpho must be like without reading it.

Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the  midland counties of England, was to be looked for.  Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland and the South of France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented.  Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities.  But in the central counties of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manner of the age.  Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be obtained, like rhubarb, from every druggist.  Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters.  There, such as were not as spotless as an angel, might have the disposition of a fiend.  But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.

Austen, J. (1818) Northanger Abbey London:  John Murray

Notice that the first sentence ends with a preposition, and Jane is probably one of the most careful writers of English.  The even and at least in the first sentence are wonderfully placed.

The other thing I noticed typing it all out is the very high degree of punctuation compared to modern usage.

   The kid was sitting in one arm-chair. I was sitting in another.
His left cheek was bulging. My left cheek was bulging. He
was turning the pages of a National Geographic Magazine.
So was I. In short, there we both were.
   He seemed a bit restless, I thought, as if the National
Geographic wasn't holding him absolutely spellbound. He would
put it down for a minute and take it up for a minute and then
put it down for a minute again, and it was during one of these
putting-it-down-for-a-minute phases that he looked over at
me.
"Where," he asked, "are the rest of the boys?"

   At this point, my literary pal opened his eyes, which he
had closed in a suffering sort of way. His manner was that
of one who has had a dead fish thrust under his nose.
   "Is this bilge," he asked, "to be printed?"

Two pages from James Adam's 1911 posthumous collection The Vitality of Platonism:

This is the opening paragraph from 'A Glastonbury Romance' by John Cowper Powys - im totally hooked by this authors style!!

At  the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe.  Something passed at that moment , a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train  from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.

Well! We see that an excerpt from Algernon Blackwood's "Human Chord" the third on our list of twenty first-raters has already appeared in message 7 of this thread, so to-day we present a typical page or two from the fourth, Hermann Broch's "Death of Vergil" - in the original German with a crib not only for the monolinguistical. The translation is by Jean Starr Untermeyer. It is probably evident why little Jean Barraqué after reading this book in 1955 - he had been introduced to it by his homosexualistic lover Professor Foucault - became so obsessed with it that he devoted the rest of his life to a system of musical settings of and commentaries upon it, one of the most noteworthy of which being his "Temps Restitué" (second version) of 1968.